About me
I have a background as a teacher and a teacher trainer and am certified as a teacher in pre-school, primary and secondary school, specialising in Swedish as a second language and special needs education. I completed my doctorate in April 2016 in the field of Swedish. A key aspect of my dissertation, Litteracitet genom interaktion [Literacy through interaction] http://oru.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A903886&dswid=-4637, is conversation in multilingual environments, a topic that I aim to expand on and study in greater detail in this research.
Literacy - a door opener in life
The majority of the world’s population is multilingual. How this multilingualism is treated in school and society in general varies to a great extent. Using several languages can expand the opportunities of individuals to express their thoughts. Literacy is a complex notion. It is an umbrella term for activities that occur in interaction with others and includes the use of language, images, symbols and various signs that are directly and indirectly connected to writing. Literacy is often produced in conversation and can be a social construct that varies depending on the context. The fundamental idea is that a crucial factor in being included in society is that all children are entitled to encounter different text types in their schooling, an idea endorsed by Sweden’s 2011 national curricula and syllabi. This is thus considered a democratic right that enables them to become full citizens in society. A key objective then is to position students as the individuals they have the potential to be. The overall aim of this project is to create knowledge about children’s learning by identifying practices for developing knowledge that also provide the multilingual student with optimal opportunities for learning in school as well as in broader society. These literacy practices include both concrete and more abstract phenomena. Literacy arises in different places and at different levels of society. The intention is to include possible multilingual practices in the study - apart from those in school environments - such as surveying the literacy of students recently arrived in Sweden and other language-based practices that take place, for instance, in libraries.